It’s ‘Madness’ still, and now a TV musical

There is something strangely out-of-time about “Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical” (premiering tonight on Showtime), a film version of the stage adaptation of a 1936 anti-marijuana exploitation film, which was an Equity-waiver hit here in 1999 and 2000 before an ill-fated off-Broadway opening four days after 9/11. “Why here?” One looks at it and wonders, “Why now?” even as one has a pretty good time watching it. Resurrected from the dustbin of cheap-cinema history in the early ‘70s, the original film -- which claimed marijuana to be a scourge worse than heroin, leading to premarital sex, random violence, permanent insanity and a deteriorating tennis game -- was a college-circuit and midnight movie sensation in the days when pot was a major issue in the generation wars, and the audience gathered for the communal fun of being in on a joke their parents didn’t get.

That movie, which Showtime will air on Wednesday, is still funny -- not for its bad science so much as its bad everything else -- but pot, as cultural signifier anyway, is not what it used to be. The stoner has become as mainstream a comic type as the drunk before him. “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee,” Merle Haggard sang in 1969, but they do now, according to a recent survey by the student paper at Muskogee High, no pun intended. That a third of Americans 12 or older are reported to have tried marijuana at least once doesn’t suggest that we have become a nation of raving lunatics. (On the other hand....) We have moved on to worrying about other drugs.

Similarly, the musical’s campiness and even its 1930s setting are more reminiscent of the glam theater of the early ‘70s, which gave birth to “The Rocky Horror Show,” which gave birth to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” of which this is a kind of admiring nephew.

But here it is, anomalously or not, and if unlooked for, it is not bad company. Points are awarded simply for its being that rare thing, a TV musical. The singing and dancing are purely pleasurable, though it’s perhaps the film’s biggest failure that the choreography -- by Mary Ann Kellogg, a former Twyla Tharp dancer -- is not well translated to the screen; neither the camerawork nor the editing, which are otherwise fine, complement it. The songs are authentically catchy, and sometimes even moving, with such pointedly strenuous rhymes as “see ya” and “sinsemilla,” “conned ya” and “ganga.”

Written by college chums Dan Studney and Kevin Murphy (now a writer/producer on “Desperate Housewives”) and directed for the screen as it was for the stage by Andy Fickman, “The Movie Musical” follows the details and arc of “Reefer Madness” Mach 1 -- boy meets girl, boy meets reefer, boy is framed for girl’s murder -- with surprising fidelity. Christian Campbell (brother of Neve, who also appears here in a small, mostly dancing part) plays squeaky-clean high school boy Jimmy to Kristen Bell’s (“Veronica Mars”) even squeakier Mary Lane, whose name conveniently rhymes with Mary Jane. Studying Shakespeare, they sing, “I bet Romeo marries his Juliet / They have a baby and make lots of friends / That’s probably how the play ends.”

Not that one, nor this one: Jimmy is seduced into a life of bad habits by Jack (Steven Weber, of “Wings” and more) and Mae (Ana Gasteyer, from “Saturday Night Live”), who run a pot-fueled den of iniquity, and most especially by Sally (the terrific Amy Spanger), a frowsy floozy who introduces herself with the line, “What a night. I was in more laps than a napkin.” John Kassir, the voice of the Crypt Keeper on “Tales From the Crypt,” is the mad, giggling Ralph, a college boy gone to, yes, pot.

To the repertoire of sin laid out by the original, the musical adds baby selling, poor-box stealing and cannibalism. There are imaginary zombies and a couple of fantasy sequences, including a Pythonesque vision of heaven with Jesus (Robert Torti) as loin-clothed nightclub singer (“the Stranger from the Manger, the Hardest Working Man in the Afterlife”). And if you have been waiting to see Veronica Mars in bondage gear, the hour has come. All this is presented as a movie within a movie, shown to the concerned parents of a small town by the bullying Lecturer, played by Alan Cumming, who appears in several other roles, including Franklin D. Roosevelt. A rousing finale includes book burning, Uncle Sam and such patriotic sentiments as “We’re taking down the fingerprints / Of jazz musicians and immigrants” and “Once the reefer has been destroyed / We’ll start on Darwin and Sigmund Freud.”

Those are sentiments not entirely without currency in our increasingly fearful world. But ultimately, the film’s a bauble, unsubtle but full of such theatrical pep that one feels something real for these ridiculous characters in their exaggerated plight. Such are the intoxicating powers of musical theater -- beware!

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‘Reefer Madness’

Where: Showtime

When: 8 tonight

Ratings: TV-MA-VSL (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17, with advisories for violence, sex and coarse language)

Kristen Bell...Mary Lane

Christian Campbell...Jimmy Harper

Neve Campbell...Miss Poppy

Alan Cumming...Lecturer/

Goat-Man/FDR

Ana Gasteyer...Mae Coleman

John Kassir...Ralph Wiley/

Uncle Sam

Amy Spanger...Sally DeBains/

Statue of Liberty

Robert Torti...Jesus

Steven Weber...Jack Stone/

George Washington

Executive producers Andy Fickman, Kevin Murphy, Dan Studney, Jan Korbelin, Jimmy Veres. Director Andy Fickman. Screenplay Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney.